1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a job management apparatus and a job management method of a digital printing system used for transmitting print data to a digital printing apparatus and printing the transmitted data.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a commercial printing industry, where payment from a third person is made by accepting an order of creation of a print product (such as a magazine, a newspaper, a brochure, an advertisement, or a photogravure) from the third person (a customer or a client), creating the print product desired by the third person, and delivering it to the third person, there is mainly used a large scale printing apparatus such as an offset reproduction printing machine. In the commercial printing industry, printing operation is performed via various processes.
The processes include document receiving, designing, layout, comprehensive layout (presentation by printer output), proofing (layout correction or color correction), proof printing, artwork creation, printing, post-processing, and delivery. An artwork is necessary in using the printing machine described above.
Once the artwork is made, it is not easy to change it and high cost is required if it is to be corrected. This is because, careful proofing, in other words, careful layout checking and color confirmation is essential in changing the artwork. As described above, in the commercial printing industry, a large scale apparatus and a certain degree of time have been required to create a print product desired by a client.
Meanwhile, according to development of electrophotography printing apparatuses and ink jet printing apparatuses that perform printing at a higher speed with a higher quality, a type of printing business called Print On Demand (POD) is increasing its market share.
According to the POD services, content of a job of a printing apparatus is divided into a relatively small lot size. Accordingly, print processing can be performed in a shorter period without using a large scale apparatus or system. The POD systems maximize utilization of digital copying machines and digital image forming apparatuses of digital multifunctional peripherals in place of the above-described large scale printing machines and printing methods and produce digital prints using electronic data.
In the POD market, in recent years, a system that supports business plan and management work by collecting information about resources that are used in producing output product by using infrastructure of POD, in other words, digital input/output environment, has been discussed. In such a system, information about resources which are used when the output product is produced is necessary. Thus, actual data of operators (human resources), or consumables (material resources) needs to be collected. However, an optimum system capable for collecting data of operators (human resources) who are actually involved in the printing operation is not realized yet.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-285784 discusses a technique concerning an operation management of operators in a POD system such as the one described above. According to this operation management, optimum scheduling of the operators and devices (printing apparatuses) is performed according to an acceptance order of the print products. For example, in an operation system such as the POD system where operations (manual operations) of a plurality of devices are performed parallely, both the schedules of the operators (work shifts) and the print job schedules assigned to the devices are optimized. Thus, when a print job is accepted, optimum scheduling of the operator and digital multifunction peripheral (MFP) can be realized.
According to the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-285784, the operator needs to be defined in advance since the scheduling of the operator has to be performed in advance. However, according to the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-285784, if a print job whose operator is not defined is accepted, even if the print job is appropriately scheduled, the printing may be performed with the operator undetermined. In such a case, if an operator corrected an error or processed the print product in the print job whose operator is not defined, the operator cannot be determined. Accordingly, operation result of each operator cannot be accurately managed.